Day: January 17, 2007

Imagine, if you will, that you’ve been watching the same team for years and years. Suddenly, and out of the blue, your team is taken over by a “business consortium”, which decides that the part of the country that your club and you are from isn’t profitable enough, and uproot it 60 miles away to a town which has never even had a Football League club, and then change its colours and its name. It’s not really your team any more, is it? I am, of course, referring to AFC Wimbledon , the second (but, on the pitch at least, most successful) “break-away” club to be formed at the turn of the century. AFCW have risen up through the non-league ranks to the Ryman League Premier Division, two divisions below the Nationwide Conference, and the opportunity see them play at Worthing, just up the road from here, wasn’t one that I was going to pass up. This season, AFCW have stumbled. They were beaten in the Ryman League play-offs last season and, although the Ryman League table is tight at the moment, they are currently sitting in mid-table, frustratingly unable to show any real consistency in the league. They’ve shown their potential in the cup competitions – they’ve knocked out two Conference clubs away from home in the FA Trophy (that’s the non-league equivalent of the FA Cup) so...